Abortion rights advocates are closely monitoring what they describe as a growing and concerning trend: lawmakers in several states have introduced legislation that would allow authorities to charge people who obtain abortions with homicide.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, at least ten states have introduced such bills for the 2025 legislative session, including Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.
Most of those states have already prohibited abortion under almost all circumstances or after six weeks of pregnancy. (The only exceptions are Missouri and North Dakota, which had near-total abortion bans that were later overturned.)
The bills define an embryo or fetus as a “unborn child” or “preborn child.” They argue that an embryo or fetus can be a homicide victim, allowing authorities to charge and prosecute those seeking abortions. Some of the bills also propose removing provisions from state laws that protect pregnant women seeking abortions from prosecution.
The bills make limited exceptions, such as in the case of “the unintentional death of a preborn child” following “life-saving procedures to save the life of a mother when accompanied by reasonable steps, if available, to save the life of her preborn child.”
Lizzy Hinkley, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, believes there has been an increase in the number of these bills introduced this year, which is “very, very alarming.” Hinkley points out that many of the states considering these bills, including South Carolina, allow the death penalty.
“It’s very much right out of the anti-abortion playbook to be introducing bills that try to control, try to oppress, and punish pregnant people,” she told me.
Three of these bills—in Indiana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—have since failed to pass. And Mary Ziegler, an abortion law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, says the chances of the remaining bills passing are “relatively low.”
These types of proposals are generally unpopular; Ziegler claims that even conservatives and anti-abortion activists disagree on whether to penalize people who seek abortions.
“Having said that, I think [these bills are] more likely to pass now than they were in previous years, and the fact that they keep coming back is significant,” Ziegler elaborates.
She adds that more of these bills have been introduced since the United States Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which repealed the constitutional right to abortion.
Typically, anti-abortion laws penalize medical providers who provide abortion care. On March 17, the Texas attorney general announced that a midwife in the state had been arrested on charges of illegally providing abortions—the first time Texas officials have brought such charges since the Dobbs ruling.
Separately, a New York-based doctor is facing a civil suit in Texas and criminal charges in Louisiana after allegedly prescribing abortion pills to patients in those states via telemedicine.
The recent criminalization bills also include fetal personhood rhetoric—a legal doctrine at the forefront of the fight for reproductive rights that seeks to grant an embryo and fetus the legal rights of humans.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring that the United States government will only recognize “two sexes, male and female.” Abortion rights advocates raised the alarm, claiming that the order contains fetal personhood language because it asserts that sex is determined “at conception.”
According to Hinkley, research shows that pregnancy criminalization has increased since the Dobbs decision.
Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting pregnant people’s rights, released a report in September revealing that at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges for “conduct associated” with pregnancy in the year following the Dobbs decision—the highest number recorded in a single year. According to Hinkley, that report “portended what we’re seeing right now.”
“It doesn’t matter if [the bills] pass this year; they’ll be back next year,” says Hinkley. “There was a time not long ago when it would have seemed absurd to have a total abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest, or a total abortion ban, period, without exceptions to save a pregnant person’s health, and that is the reality that pregnant people across the country are currently living in.
So, whether it’s this year, next year, or a few years from now, this is a very bleak picture of what the end game is for anti-abortion legislators and activists.”